Meanwhile, violence continues to wreak havoc over large swathes of the country. Organized crime-related executions continue at the startling pace of more than 1,000 a month since Peña Nieto took office on Dec. 1. While some border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana have shown improvement, other coastal cities such as Acapulco and Veracruz are much worse off than they were in the past. And even in places where the homicide rate has gone down, there is widespread suspicion that this is due more to deals being cut with the drug cartels than to actually defeating them, as reflected in the most recent report of the International Crisis Group and reports in the international press.
Peña Nieto talks about changing the approach to the "drug war" by focusing on reducing crime and improving social programs instead of on drug interdiction, but in fact his strategy has been more of the same. The president has not taken any steps to withdraw the more than 40,000 military troops that today patrol Mexico's streets, putting human rights at grave risk, nor has he taken any concrete measures to clean up endemic corruption in law enforcement. Instead, he has conducted a minor bureaucratic shake-up by eliminating the Fox-era federal public security agency and next plans to create a new national police out of military personal, paradoxically just as Fox himself did 10 years ago. Peña Nieto has also suggested that the media no longer pay so much attention to violent crime, as if turning the other way could somehow make the problem miraculously disappear.
The press, meanwhile, has come under heavy attack under the new administration. Three of Mexico's leading female investigative journalists, Lydia Cacho, Anabel Hernández, and Ana Lilia Pérez, whose principal work has been to expose government complicity with organized crime, have had to leave the country in recent months due to threats and judicial pressure on their work. One of the most important international NGOs that defends press freedoms, London-based Article 19, recently received a letter with credible death threats under the door of its office in Mexico City. Meanwhile, the dominant television and radio monopolies continue to allow very little space for genuinely plural debate on public affairs and rarely criticize the president's policies.
In the economic realm, we need to look beyond the short-term increase in international portfolio investment. According to Mexico's Central Bank, international capital flows have skyrocketed in recent months. This is due to a combination of both low interest rates in more developed economies and the international media hype around Peña Nieto's presidency. Japanese investment has played a particularly important role. But the recent political difficulties reveal important underlying problems with the top-down development model being pursued by Mexico's new president.
There is also growing concern about underlying fundamentals. For instance, past-due consumer debts are now at their highest level since the 2008-2009 economic crisis. If Peña Nieto responds to today's political difficulties with more police repression, as he did on his inauguration day, instead of by changing course and opening himself up to a genuine dialogue with civil society, the economy could easily come tumbling down like a house of cards.
Peña Nieto's honeymoon has not lasted long. Extremely controversial reforms such as a new role for foreign oil companies in the energy sector and an increase in the value-added tax, which the president had promised to implement at the beginning of his administration, look less feasible than ever. Washington's hope that Mexico could serve as an anti-Bolivarian "stabilizing" force in the region may also have to wait for another day.
But this is good news for the Main Streets of North America. Washington's geopolitics and Peña Nieto's proposed energy and tax reforms were never designed in the best interest of the common man and woman anyway. Instead of increasing its highly regressive value-added tax, Mexico, one of the most unequal countries in the world with a Gini coefficient of .51, should consider implementing capital gains and wealth taxes. Instead of handing over its oil reserves to abusive and environmentally dangerous international oil corporations, Mexico may well be able to manage better on its own by increasing the investment, transparency and technology of its homegrown company, PEMEX. Instead of helping the United States dominate Latin America, Mexico could do a great service to peace and stability in the region by defending a healthy multilateralism.
In general, Peña Nieto's weakness creates an opportunity for organized civil-society groups to start rebuilding the broken link between politics and society which is the underlying cause of Mexico's contemporary problems. Mexico is not a "failed state" that needs to be buffered through increased militarization or by recentralizing power in the executive branch, as Peña Nieto and some scholars seem to think. To the contrary, the central problem is not a lack of state power but the consistent abuse of the government's significant authority by politicians of all colors and stripes to favor friends and punish rivals.
Fortunately, independent citizen action has the potential to transform the system before the entire edifice comes crumbling down in a widespread and dangerous political crisis. If Obama, and the citizens of the United States he represents, dare to look beyond Peña Nieto and into the eyes of their Mexican neighbors, colleagues, and family members, they will inevitably find a source of enormous hope for the future.
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